- Title
- Mavis Seidlitz: partner in crime and metonym for crime fiction partnership
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- Private Investigator p. 68-79
- Relation
- Crime Uncovered
- Relation
- https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=5180/
- Publisher
- Intellect
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- Australian authors of crime fiction often fly under the radar. Barry Maitland, who is one of Australia's leading contemporary exponents of the police procedural genre (albeit with his own unique take, influenced at once by his career as an architect and professor of architecture, and a passion for the work of Georges Simenon), is a case in point. Among the media praise for his work presented on the inner cover of his most recent novel, Crucifixion Creek (2014), is the following from The Australian: 'Australia has arguably one of the top five crime writers in the world, and you may well never have heard of him. It's Barry Maitland.' The same can also be said of Australia's other great undiscovered treasure, Carter Brown. Like Maitland, Carter Brown, aka Alan Geoffrey Yates, originated from the United Kingdom; and again like Maitland, he set his novels outside Australia.' His detectives (they include cops as well as private investigators) are based in the United States, mainly New York and California; they include Al Wheeler, Danny Boyd, Rick Holman and Johnny Rio, these last two being Pis specifically located in Hollywood. In all probability it is this disconnection between place of authorship and setting of plot that lies behind Peter Robb's assessment of Carter Brown as a hybrid figure. (Authorial disconnection is, of course, not uncommon in 'Australian' crime fiction; as Stephen Knight's work has shown (1986: 446]. many authors of crime fiction that passes for 'Australian' were born overseas, with many never losing their connection to their 'other' nationality.) What may also have lain behind Robb's comment, on the other hand, and certainly what I infer from it, is that Brown figures hybridity. For, and this is where his case is more complicated than Maitland's, Brown embodies multiple hybridities: as a writer or - to use a post-structuralist term that divorces the physical being from the text produced - as a scriptor, he is British and Australian; as an author, he is Australian and American in terms of the agencies of his detectives and his publishers; and perhaps most interestingly, as a publishing phenomenon, he is global and, especially, French.
- Subject
- crime fiction; detective fiction; private investigators
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1340630
- Identifier
- uon:28533
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781783205233
- Language
- eng
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